Facial age estimation from images is a difficult problem, both because it is naturally difficult to tell the exact age of a person visually, and because of the variations in images, such as illumination, pose, and expression. ...

In recent years P2P systems have gained tremendous popularity. Support of a transaction processing facility in P2P systems would provide databases at a low cost. Extending distributed database algorithms such as 2PC and ...

The goal of this thesis is bringing closer together the game theoretic approach of creating incentives with the requirements and properties of P2P systems. Briefly, we detail the P2P system context that incentive mechanisms ...

Swarm Intelligence is the study of "the emergent collective intelligence of groups of simple agents." Recent research has explored the important applications in the field of business, telecommunications, robotics and ...

The popular k-means algorithm is used to discover clusters in vector data automatically. We present three accelerated algorithms that compute exactly the same clusters much faster than the standard method. First, we redesign ...

Touchless, mid-air, gesture-based interactions have recently moved out of laboratories and Hollywood movies and into the hands of users. There is little difference in the interaction style and techniques used today from ...

To accurately measure the amount of information a genetic algorithm can
generate, we must first measure the amount of information one can store, using a
fitness map. The amount of information generated, minus the storage ...

Automated reasoning systems are powerful computer programs capable of solving
complex problems. They are characterized as computationally intensive having
high performance requirements. Very few reasoning systems have ...

Participant-based technologies enable users to contribute resources to a shared pool that in the aggregate provides valuable services, such as social networks, massive multiplayer online games, file exchange, etc. Such ...

There is a need for more rigorous analysis techniques that developers can use for verifying the critical properties in UML models. The UML-based Specification Environment (USE) tool supports verification of invariants, ...

A common peer-to-peer approach to large data distribution is to divide the data into blocks. Peers will gather blocks from other peers in parallel. Problems with this approach are that each peer must know which blocks ...

We present a novel algorithm called PG-means in this thesis. This algorithm is able to determine the number of clusters
in a classical Gaussian mixture model automatically. PG-means uses efficient statistical hypothesis ...

A search process is an attempt to locate a solution to a problem, such as an optimization problem, where the space is usually too large to exhaustively sample. In order to investigate this idea this work looks a three ...

A key problem in software development is producing systems that are maintainable even as the concerns at play evolve. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) seeks to foster maintainability by isolating the speciﬁcations of ...